There’s some magic baked into if let item = item as? T that automatically lifts optionals, which doesn’t yet seem to extend to try?. If you’re running into these situations, consider adding parentheses and nil-coalescing as demonstrated in these examples.

In case you think a throwing-optional scenario is too “out there”, think of a file system request that would throw on an unreadable directory and return nil if a specific file does not exist. Although obscure, it is not unthinkable to combine the two approaches.